I choose to believe that PMC (Pokemon.Marriland.com) is a pretty nice site, and I choose to think that it has many features unique to the site that can't be found anywhere else on the web. It's run efficiently, and everything, for the most part, works just great. But it wasn't always like this...

I remember when the site first began... It didn't even have a name. I began by starting a website in late 1996. It was really quite pathetic, but it was a start, and that's what's most important.

October 1996 - Click here to see the old, old version of my website. This was before it was called Marriland (and before Pokemon was released in the USA).
(E-mail and forms aren't functional. Files may also be missing.)

Yes, very pathetic, at least compared to as it is now, but like I said, it was a start. I had a bit of comprehension on design, and even though every word I typed started with a Capital Letter, I was just barely 9 at the time, and I only have been familliar with a computer for around a year.

I never really did anything with my site after I created it. I was one of the countless others whom created a site, then just abandoned it. I had other interests, I'll admit. But one of those interests at the time happened to be Pokemon. It was January or February when I first started hearing of Pokemon. I received the old "Pokemon Powers" from Nintendo Power around then, and that's when I became energized! Before long, I was obsessed with it, and couldn't wait for it to arrive!

Red and Blue were released, and then came Yellow, Snap, and Stadium. I started getting into the Trading Card Game when it came out, although it wasn't until August of 1998 when I started playing the game with other people. That's when I first started going to Tomorrow is Yesterday, the hobby store that I play at every week, even to this date.

When Gold and Silver were in the works, I started hearing of 'Pikablu', or Marill. It sounded pretty cool. Then, I bought the Japanese Gold and Silver games from eBay (because I knew a bit of Japanese), and I remember wanting a Marill so bad! Suddenly Marill became my favorite Pokemon.

Now, somewhere around this time, I started creating a real website. One that would actually have its own host, not like AOL or Geocities. But I was in a quandry - I needed to think of a name for the site! I went back and forth, and back and forth, and I was stumped. Then, I thought about it, and I was going to call it "The Land of the Marrils" (Marill was spelled 'Marril' before it came out in the USA). I then decided to condense it, it go with "Marriland" because it was the Land of the Marrils.

Nowadays, Marriland is my alias, and it no longer means The Land of the Marrils, it just means... Marriland.

But anyway, I started creating the site, and I even had all of these cheesy Marill images up there. It had some okay content, and a few decks, but it wasn't anything fantastic. Then again, it was much better than my previous site, so I guess I couldn't complain. At the time, I thought that Marriland was so cool! Oh man, if only I could've looked into the future and saw the current Marriland (well, the Pokemon section of Marriland, Pokemon.Marriland.com).

September 19, 2000 - Click here to see the first version of Marriland.com.
(E-mail and forms aren't functional. Files may also be missing.)

It had really come a long way since the previous site that I tried to make. It actually had interest content on it, and at the time, it had an interview with the 5th highest DCI-ranked player in the world at the time.

It didn't have a very good layout though, and there were way too many images on it. And those Marills... They were just too darn cheesy! But hey, it was a really basic form of a fansite back then, and shortly after that design, I created a new design... A much better design.

I'm pretty sure that, sometime between December of 2000 and February of 2001, I redesigned the site, adding a navigation panel to the right-side - similar to what you see today, except only on the right-side.

At this point, I had a few people visit the site, but before too long, it would all change, and I would get quite a large influx of people visiting the site.

After the West Coast Super Trainer Showdown in June 2001, I sent in my report to Pojo, and instead of posting the report on their site, they linked to the report I had on my site! That sent a lot of people to my site, and that's when it started to really grow!

At this point, I had become quite a skilled TCG player, and my webdesign skills have vastly improved. I redesigned the site several times, and each redesign looked better than the last. I also came up with "Cards by U", which was an early version of the Custom Cards you see on the site today.

All of the spoilers (previously called "Card Guides"), Walkthroughs, Deck Ideas, Deck Fixes, and Cards by U were all done as normal text documents (*.txt). Originally, the CARDs of the WEEK were not only randomly selected, but they were also ugly text documents. Later on, I started making them HTML documents instead, and adding images to them.

I also created my own message board using ezBoard. It was alright, and it had a few members on it, but I think the current Marriland Forums (PHP-based) are much better.

Unfortunately, due to a computer crash, I've lost some of the previous versions of Marriland.com.

Throughout 2002, I had been hooked on an online game, Neopets, and it detracted from my work on Marriland.

At one point, I was going to try having 4 different sections of Marriland: one for Pokemon; one for Dragonball Z; one for Neopets; and one for RPG Maker 2000 (an RPG designing program). That idea never really worked, and after trying that, before too long, I ended up closing the site.

A lot of my visitors stopped visiting Marriland. A lot of my friends tried to keep it alive, but were unsuccessful. It ended up being just like the old website I created 6 years ago: dead. It pained me to see that, but Pokemon was dying off for me. It had become less and less interesting.

And thus, Marriland slowly faded away...

Sometime around March of 2003, after a few new sets had been released, I started getting back into Pokemon, and I updated for the first time in over 4 months on my site. I started updating it more and more, but I discovered that I had lost a great deal of my visitors. I was down to under 20 visitors a day.

Around that time, I was also starting to learn a scripting language, PHP, and was practicing it on another one of my sites. It was very primitive PHP, but it worked, and I was happy. Little would I know that my PHP skills would become so powerful, and would end up saving the site.

In mid-May, after I had finally gotten the site up and running again, something terrible happened. The server that was hosting Marriland (and our family business site, P-R Posters) crashed, and the webhoster was being an absolute idiot about it. Everything on the site had been erased. Gone. Forever.

I only had what remained on my computer to rebuild the site with. But even that would meet a tragic end...

The following Saturday, my father was working on getting our computers networks set up so we'd be networked. He needed to do a Microsoft Update in order to proceed. The Microsoft Update ended up disabling me from accessing my computer. Completely unable to access any of the files! To make matters worse, all of this happened while I was gone.

We ended up having to reformat my hard drive, erasing all of the data. We bought a program that was capable of recovering some of the data, but a great deal of it, especially the newer files, ended up being corrupted, and unusable. I had some of the files, but I didn't have anything I could use to get the site back up and running.

Not only was my website deleted, but so was my computer. There was only one option: start from scratch.

We first started off by moving to a new hosting place, and it actually ended up to work out much nicer than the old one. Then, I started coming up with a new design using some CSS, and my newfound skill, PHP.

I decided since I had to start from scratch anyway, I'd use some of the PHP that I learned on it so it would hopefully function a lot better. Once I started learning about PHP and MySQL's (a database program) wonderful compatibility and synergy with each other, I decided that PHP/MySQL would definitely be the way to run the site.

From there, I was able to practice my PHP/MySQL skills and take them to the next level. Instead of having to have a seperate page for each Deck Idea, Deck Fix, and CARD of the WEEK, I'm able to dynamically generate the pages by pulling them from a database. This means that all of the content that you send in is posted to the site with a click of a button, as opposed to me having to enter it into a page, convert it, save it, and upload it. This means I'm able to get a lot more done, and have the potential to do much more than most all websites.

I also decided rather than having the site remain as Marriland.com, I figured it'd be better to change it to Pokemon.Marriland.com so, if at some point I plan on adding another section to the site, it'd be much easier to do so. And also Pokemon.Marriland.com is a bit more descriptive than just Marriland.com.

The official nickname of the site is PMC, although you can also call it Marriland.

I opened up the Marriland Forums, and they slowly became active. I also added some of the old content, and eventually designed the Custom Card Submitter, which was very similar to the old Cards by U submitter.

I submitted the site to search engines once I felt that it was worthy, and once they hit the search engines... BOOM! The traffic started pouring in again! I was finally getting visitors to the site!

I started construction on a Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire Walkthrough, and that attracted a lot of people to the site. Unfortunately, the in-depth version of the Walkthrough was never completed, but a lighter version is available.

And there you have it. I've designed countless scripts to assist the site's growth, and make your stay even more enjoyable. Without visitors like you, this dream would never have been accomplished, and this site would only have been half-decent, or even worse: dead.

To a long and happy future, PMC!
~Marriland